


In Perfect Light

by Drag0nst0rm



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Addiction, Alternate Universe, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, He Knows What He's Talking About, Listen to Ulmo, Mind/Mood Altering Substances, Minor Character Death, Or rather magic to the same effect, Stepford Elves, The Two Trees of Valinor, The Valar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 17:35:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17902505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drag0nst0rm/pseuds/Drag0nst0rm
Summary: The Secondborn aren't the only ones who can't bear the glory of Aman.





	In Perfect Light

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own the Silmarillion.

Finwe goes to Aman because if there is the slightest chance his people can find safety there, he owes it to them to look, but he spends the whole trip there wary and fearful, sure it’s some sort of trap.

That tension melts away the moment he sees the light of the Trees. It hits him like a peaceful wave, offering more bliss in one moment than the rest of his life combined.

He remembers his people, of course, remembers Miriel, but they’re a distant concern. They’ll be fine, he’s sure. Everything will be fine.

He’s reluctant to leave, but he tears himself away to go fetch his people.

The memory … concerns him a bit, once he’s out of reach of the light. He hadn’t thought anything could make his fierce, protective love of his wife and his people seem distant and small.

He had been overwhelmed, he convinces himself. He just needs to get used to it.

The idea of not going back to that light, of never tasting it again, is absolutely unthinkable.

 

(“Are we sure we should bring them here?” Ulmo asks. 

“They felt so much less pain here,” Nienna says through her silent tears.

“They’ll be safer,” Orome agrees.

“It’s already decided,” Manwe reminds him. “Do you defy our decision?”

Ulmo sighs. “Of course not. They just seemed to react a little strangely to being here.”

“They’re just not used to being safe,” Orome says. “They’ll get used to it in time.”

“ … Of course.”)

 

Miriel loves their new land as much as he does. Of course she does. Even if sometimes he catches the oddest look on her face, like she’s struggling to remember something and can almost reach it but can’t quite close the distance.

It’s not important.

Then she’s pregnant, and it’s one more quiet pleasure in a sea of many. He doesn’t worry when the pregnancy doesn’t go quite as expected. Everything’s going to be fine.

Feanaro comes into the world screaming. The noise is a shock to his system, and for a moment he’s overwhelmed. This is his son, he has a son, and he’s perfect, absolutely perfect, but suddenly all the healers have been jolted into concern for Miriel, running to her side, and something is wrong, wrong, wrong - 

Feanor calms eventually, and the peace steals back in.

Everything’s going to be fine.

After all, Namo has promised to bring back the dead.

 

Miriel refuses to come back.

“I’m … tired,” she says, shooting a sidelong glance at the Valar. “I’ll heal better here.”

Finwe doesn’t understand. There’s no light in Mandos’s Halls. How could she possibly feel better there?

But there’s no point worrying about it. 

He sees Indis singing and the beauty catches his eye even here in a world full of beauties. It eases some of the unpleasant uncertainty starting to curdle in the back of his mind.

And Feanaro needs a mother. The lack of one has hurt the boy, there’s no doubt about that. There can be no other reason for why now, even after he can speak so eloquently and doesn’t need cries to communicate, he sometimes still weeps.

 

(“Does this concern you at all?” Ulmo asks Vaire.

“Miriel says she doesn’t object to the remarriage.”

“That’s really not what I meant.”)

 

Feanaro knows his whole childhood that he is marred.

Everyone else is calm and happy and at peace. Everyone else trusts the Valar implicitly. Everyone else knows everything is fine.

Feanaro gets impatient. Feanaro rages and argues and shouts. Feanaro weeps for the mother that left him behind. 

Feanaro feels very, very alone.

No one else ever starts it. But Feanaro discovers that if he does, sometimes he can drag them into it too. 

If he grits his teeth and asks people nicely to call his mother’s name the way she wished it to be called, they smile vaguely and say, “Of course, if it matters to you.”

(Sometimes Feanaro thinks he’s the only person anything matters to.)

If he’s rude and dismissive and tries very, very, _very_ hard to provoke a fight, sometimes he gets one. Their eyes will spark and their voice will rise, and for just a few moments, they’ll show something real, and he’s not alone.

If he shouts and screams at Indis and calls her every horrible name he can think of, she frowns faintly and asks him if he needs a healer or to sit in the light for a while. All the Vanyar are like that, refusing to be roused, and Feanaro knows it’s wrong to want so badly to touch everyone else with his corruption, but he still hates them for it.

If he shouts at Finwe and tells him he’s a horrible father that only loves Indis, Finwe’s voice will break with true desperation as he begs Feanaro just to tell him how to help him.

Feanaro knows it’s wrong, but somehow those moments convince him that his father really does love him far more than any number of the times Finwe tells him he does, calmly, eyes distant, words rote.

 

When he’s in his adolescence, he takes his first trip to Tol Eressea, where the light of the Trees is more distant and sometimes hidden in shadow.

For the first time, he sees the stars.

For the first time, he meets people who are already at least half awake.

For the first time, he wonders if maybe the problem isn’t that he’s marred. Maybe the problem is whatever has lured nearly everyone else into this dreamlike state.

 

He experiments. Is it the Valar? The food? The water?

The light?

 

(“Feanaro,” Ulmo says to Manwe. He doesn’t really have to say anything else.

“Aule says he’s very talented,” Manwe says stubbornly.

“Aule also says Feanaro threw a prototype at the wall of his workshop yesterday.”

“ _Aule_ does that sometimes.”

“Oh, yes,” Ulmo agrees. “My concern isn’t that he did it. It’s that all the rest of the Firstborn _don’t.”_ )

 

Most art Feanaro sees is pretty and only that. There is something lifeless about it. Dull. 

Nerdanel’s statues are full of repressed passion, emotion that even she doesn’t quite seem to understand.

He can almost reach her. He can stir her up more easily than he can anyone else save his father, and he keeps thinking he can wake her up for good if only he says just the right thing.

It doesn’t work, but he keeps trying.

 

Maitimo’s temper is not half so short as his own, but his spirit burns intensely nonetheless. Of all his children, Maitimo is the closest to being fully, completely awake.

Makalaure is the closest to being entirely subsumed by the pleasant peace of the light. He’s too wound up in the music of the world, and the music here is a heady thing, ready to drown his second son in its delightful depths. The music Makalaure makes is beautiful, but sometimes it scarcely sounds like him at all. It sounds instead like he is only a conduit that the music is rushing through. It sounds like he is being hollowed out until he’s nothing but a vessel for its notes.

He drags the whole family out into the starlight and away from the Trees as often as he can, but he’s always especially sure to take Makalaure. He’ll shiver, away from the Trees’ warmth, complain and ache, and have mood shifts like lightning, but he’s there. He’s real. He’s not being born away somewhere where Feanaro can’t save him.

 

Nerdanel grows to hate the trips more and more. Her hands shake when she’s away from the light, and she snaps at him more and more frequently. 

“Why do you keep doing this?” she finally demands.

“The Trees - “

“Why are you so determined not to be happy? And even if you are, why do you keep dragging our children into it?”

“Because that’s not living!” he shouts. “It’s not real. Not like it is out here.”

“I’m going home,” she tells him flatly.

Weeks later, when Feanaro returns, she smiles and says it’s good to see him. She doesn’t seem concerned by their argument at all.

 

He had tried to rouse his first half-brother a half-dozen times, but it had never worked. His half-brother is as pleasant and blissful and empty as ever.

He never bothers with Arafinwe. He already knows how it will go.

 

(“Tyelkormo hunts with you, doesn’t he, Orome?”

“Yes,” Orome says warily. He thinks he knows where Ulmo’s going with this.

“Tell me, do you notice a difference in him the further you get into the Outer Lands?”’

Orome doesn’t want to admit it, but eventually he yields. “Yes,” he says. “I do.”)

 

Feanaro tries drawing the light of the Trees into gemstones. Maybe if he can capture it, he can study it. Change it.

Concentrated in the gem, it glows for him like never before, overwhelming even the fire within that so quickly burns it out otherwise. 

For three days, he sits unmoving, caught up in wordless ecstasy.

He only dimly hears the banging on his workshop door. His sons’ cries when they finally break it down. They way they go silent.

He turns, absently, and sees them frozen, faces slack.

He has one moment of half-clarity. It’s enough.

He throws a cloak over the Silmarils and breaks the spell.

He never goes near the gems after that without precautions. He quickly learns it’s best not to let anyone else near them even with those.

He understands for the first time why everyone else loves the light so much. He tells himself he still doesn’t want it. He drags his sons further and further away from its terrible peace.

He can’t help coming back to the gems, though, however carefully, for just one more taste of how it feels to be so completely without pain.

 

They have to leave. It’s the only option. All his studies have failed, and he’s losing Makalaure. Losing the twins. Losing Nerdanel. It’s the only way.

He stirs up a fight because it’s the only way to get anyone else to pay attention. He holds a sword on his half-brother and wonders, _Would you even care if I pressed down? Would your wife? Would your children?_

_Or would they all keep thinking that everything is fine even as you bled out on our father’s floor?_

 

The Valar care, apparently, even though he never goes through on the threat. 

Nolofinwe, on the other hand, speaks for Feanaro at his trial.

“There was no harm done,” he says lightly. “How could there be? Everything’s fine. I see no reason for Feanaro to have to go anywhere, particularly if it would upset him to.”

Feanaro wonders if it’s just his imagination that Manwe looks vaguely concerned. 

 

Apparently he’s not the only one stirring up trouble. 

Melkor destroys the Trees.

Feanaro would thank him for that if it weren’t for the rest of what Melkor does.

The world goes dark, and everyone else seems to go mad as terror crashes down on them after countless long years of really even feeling vague apprehension.

Feanaro stands in a ring of the Valar and listens as they try to tell him that the Trees should be repaired.

It’s chaos in the dark, but it’s real.

Feanaro laughs in their faces.

He does not laugh when the rest of the news comes.

 

(“I did say something was wrong,” Ulmo reminds Manwe.

“You did,” Manwe concedes. “But do you honestly think this is _better?”_ )

 

His father is dead. His father is dead, just when he finally would have had the chance to really feel something.

When Feanaro gains control of himself at long last - and perhaps the Trees had affected him after all, because he feels wilder than ever before - he goes back to Tirion.

He gives him a speech about justice and revenge, about freedom and embracing this chance, about building anew. Some of the faces light up.

Most just look up at him with unfulfilled need.

Faces sallow and already sunken. Hands shaking. Minds cringing back from all this pain.

He feels it too, a bit. He knows.

So he says what he knows will grab them all. 

“The light still lives!” he cries. “It shines in my Silmarils! We go to get them back!”

The crowd roars with desperate approval.

He swears an Oath to retrieve that beautiful, terrible light.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he’s fulfilled it. He hopes that by then the Noldor will know that life without it is better. Hopes they’ll no longer need it, crave it, wrap every dream around regaining it.

Hopes his own need for one more glimpse will have faded away.

 

(“See how quickly they turn on each other without the light?” Namo says.

“They’ve forgotten how to deal with real emotion,” Ulmo says. “Of course they’re lashing out at each other. They’ve forgotten what pain is, and that other people can feel it.”

“We can’t let them go to Middle Earth like that,” Manwe says. “They’re not prepared.”

“Of course,” Ulmo says, and he lets Osse stir up a storm of rage. It is right, for Ulmo too weeps for the Teleri lost in that frantic lashing out.

He also makes sure the storm winds blow due east, back to the lands they never should have left.)


End file.
